• Errors in the Nobel prize list on this datablog have been rectified. A correction was posted by the Readers editor on 14 October 2009. Click here to read it

Barack Obama is in good company: Nelson Mandela, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King and former US president Teddy Roosevelt. All have won Nobel peace prizes in the award's (sometimes controversial) 108 year history.

The first African American to hold the US's highest office, Obama has called for disarmament and attempted – so far without success – to restart the stalled Middle East peace process. He is currently considering whether to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan where the US is mired in an eight-year-old conflict.

The choice of Obama for the prize from a field of more than 200 candidates astounded international commentators, in part because he took office less than two weeks before the February nomination deadline.

CORRECTION POSTED ON 14 OCTOBER 2009

We published a list of everyone who has ever won the Nobel peace prize, based on the Nobelprize.org's list and invited Guardian users to send us their visualisations (graphic representations of the information) and mash ups (combinations of this and other data). The Nobel prize website lists only the year and winner(s) but we decided to include more detailed information across seven columns. We showed joint winners separately and added the sex and country of each individual to make it easier for users to consider different ways of looking at the data. Unfortunately, when the creator (working as both author and editor) of the blogpost reorganised the information (copying it into a word file first, then pasting it into an excel file) and added the extra details about the recipients the names of some joint winners were accidentally deleted, although their countries were included. He spotted two missing names John Raleigh Mott (1946, joint winner with Emily Greene Balch) and the League of Red Cross Societies (1963 joint winner with International Committee of the Red Cross) a few minutes after the blogpost was launched. He also added "The Quakers" as a joint winner in 1947 (this was later changed to "Amer. Friends Service Cittee (Quakers)"). Unhappily, other missing names were not added for more than four hours because another glitch - a Java error - meant that user comments could not be seen by either Firefox or Safari users and the blogpost author was involved in trying to fix this. Some time after 4pm this was done and he saw that people who had posted comments were pointing out that the names of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin (1994, joint winners with Yasser Arafat) and Menachem Begin (1978, joint winner with Anwar al-Sadat) were also missing - he added these shortly afterwards. Kofi Annan was joint winner with the United Nations in 2001 and in error we listed his country as the USA, rather than Ghana. Our list also said that Bertha von Suttner (1905) was from Switzerland, but she was actually from Austria-Hungary. Both of these country name errors were also corrected on 9 October. A further correction was made on 12 October to reflect the fact that José Ramos-Horta (1996, joint winner with Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo) is from East Timor as our list had omitted to include a country name for him.